It was standing room only on July 25 in the cramped Senate hearing room, where State Senator Charles Schneider of West Des Moines (Senate district 22) bucked Iowa law to schedule a last-minute mock hearing to discuss the fate of Iowa’s teachers and public employees. Will they have a respectable hard-earned retirement, or will they subsist on cat food?

You would think a question of this importance would be discussed in a non-partisan committee meeting, open to input — pro and con — from the public. Not in this scenario.

The process started somewhat normally. (You can watch the video here.) Donna Mueller, CEO of IPERS, presented facts about how retirement benefits are funded and how adjustments to funding assumptions are made. To its credit, the non-partisan board did a really excellent job of explaining the nuances, details, as well as pitfalls in the way it has made decisions and the ways that they are continuously correcting for market adjustments.

What happened next was like nothing we have ever seen before: Senator Schneider invited two representatives of a libertarian think tank organization, the Reason Foundation — a clearly partisan organization whose co-founder coined the term “privatization” — and gave them equal time to present their alternate, biased conception of reality. No left-wing groups were invited to comment. The labor unions were left out of the discussion. Most disgustingly, the people weren’t allowed to weigh in on either side of the debate.